Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Undercover Homosexual Methodist 'Pastors' Exposed

More than a hundred male and female American leaders in the United Methodist Church joined together this week to formally admit they've been falsely serving in local churches by concealing their claims to deviant sexuality. Their announcement comes as the UMC quadrennial global General Conference begins in Portland, Oregon where these renegades will attempt to force their personal predilections upon the world-wide traditionally Christian denomination that believes homosexual behavior is incompatible with church teaching.

". . . this public relations campaign is designed to overwhelm our denomination’s infrastructure until traditionalists abandon their theological moorings."-- Rev. Tom Lambrecht, Vice President and General Manager of Good News (representing UMC Christians who hold to Scriptural Authority)

Dozens of United Methodist clergy members came out as lesbian, gay or bisexual on Monday, defying their church's ban on "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" serving in ministry and essentially daring their supervisors to discipline them.

In a public letter posted online, 111 pastors, deacons, elders and candidates for ministry said church rules require "that we not bring our full selves to ministry, that we hide from view our sexual orientations and gender identities."

A spokesman for Reconciling Ministries Network, [a renegade UMC] LGBT advocacy group that organized the letter, said that about 80% of the 111 signatories are coming out to their supervisors for the first time. In addition to gay and lesbian clergy, the letter was also signed by intersex and transgender pastors, who are not technically excluded from ministry.

Monday's missive follows a similar letter issued by 15 Methodist ministers in New York, who also openly acknowledged that they are gay or lesbian.

A council of African bishops issued a statement last September urging Methodists to "submit to the teachings of Scripture that God designed marriage to be between man and woman."

The United Methodist Church, the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination with 7.4 million members [in the U.S.], has debated homosexuality at its General Conference every four years for four decades.

While the U.S. membership in the denomination has declined, membership in Africa has expanded, and those members have an increasingly important voice in the General Conference debates. While the U.S. leadership has become more accepting of homosexuality, the newer African members have held the conservative line.

While the number of United Methodists in Africa grows by about 250,000 members a year, the number of U.S. United Methodists shrinks every year, by more than 50,000.

Africans will constitute about 30 percent of the 864 delegates to this year's General Conference.

Without the church's growing global membership, the United Methodists would very likely have taken a turn towards acceptance of gay marriage, like several other mainline Protestant denominations . . .

The United Methodist Church does not permit its clergy to officiate same-sex marriages, but that divisive issue and others regarding full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender members are up for debate as the denomination convenes its top policy-making body this week in Portland, Ore.

Delegates from across the globe will consider more than 100 pieces of legislation regarding human sexuality at the General Conference, which meets every four years to decide the future direction of the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States. It counts about 12.8 million members worldwide.

The 864 delegates gathering at the Oregon Convention Center have the power to revise church law, pass resolutions on social and public policy and adopt churchwide budgets and plans. While LGBT concerns are in the spotlight, the General Conference is considering a plethora of issues. The gathering started Tuesday afternoon with a worship celebration and concludes May 20.

The Rev. Tom Lambrecht, Vice President and General Manager of Good News, an organization that has advocated for the retention of the current United Methodist teaching on homosexuality, released a statement this afternoon in response to the letter from 111 UM clergy identifying themselves as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, and Intersex (LGBTQI).

“Unfortunately, the statement comes across more like a manifesto for an orchestrated campaign to influence General Conference than a ‘Love Letter to the Church,’” Lambrecht wrote.

Lambrecht addressed the concerns raised by the letter writers about their need to hide parts of themselves as they carry out the work of ministry:

The letter talks about LGBTQI persons being forced to hide parts of themselves in order to engage in ministry. No one is forcing LGBTQI persons to hide their identities. That is a choice that they are making. The church has always been straightforward about what is acceptable behavior for clergy. Having same-sex attractions or being LGBTQI is not a bar to ordained ministry. Engaging in sexual relationships outside monogamous heterosexual marriage is a bar to ordained ministry. The line is clear. It is LGBTQI persons who have chosen to cross that line and yet pretend to fulfill their ordination vows. Such an action constitutes a fundamental lack of integrity that undermines the doctrine, discipline, and unity of the church.

Disputes over human sexuality appear to many to be most pressing [for the UMC General Conference]. This is in part because United Methodists have not changed their stance on homosexuality, whereas much of mainline Protestantism has in some way. The United Methodist Book of Discipline – the group’s book of law and doctrine – calls homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The church has also seen huge controversy in recent years as pastors have begun openly bucking the ban on officiating at same-sex weddings, and high-profile disciplinary trials have embarrassed many Methodists.

According to the United Methodist News Service, the conference will weigh more than 100 pieces of legislation on human sexuality. Delegates from dozens of countries will consider the possibility of full inclusion of LGBT people, the “agree to disagree” option, whether gay people can be ordained, the question of officiating at same-sex weddings, whether such weddings can be held in Methodist churches and whether the current Book of Discipline wording should remain.

The United Methodist News Service lists “church structure and powers” as the first of top, broad issues to be voted upon this month. The most broad is a measure asking whether Methodists “can create a global Book of Discipline that says: ‘Here’s what we agree upon worldwide,’ and then one for each area of the world to help us deal with our own cultures,” said the Rev. Tom Berlin, a delegate from the Floris United Methodist Church in Herndon, Va. “The issue is: What questions belong to the whole, and what questions belong to the parts?”

. . . [Rev. Val Rosenquist, 59,] the pastor of Charlotte’s First United Methodist Church and a retired bishop [Melvin Talbert] who once did jail time with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decided to go ahead over the weekend and preside at the wedding of John Romano and Jim Wilborne.

The two Charlotte men became the first same-sex couple in North Carolina to get married – at least publicly – in a United Methodist church.

They said the Saturday wedding was attended by more than 250 people – including about 30 supportive United Methodist clergy. Also in attendance: Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, who is a friend of the couple’s.

Last August, [Rosenquist] said, the leadership board at First United Methodist voted that any member of the church could get married in the sanctuary, even if that defied the [UMC] Book of Discipline.

The 81-year-old Talbert, a retired United Methodist bishop based in Nashville and a one-time leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, spent three days and three nights in a jail cell with King in 1960. He called his disobedience of Methodist rules against same-sex marriage an act of “biblical obedience.”

On Sunday, Talbert delivered the sermon at First United Methodist Church, telling about 150 people in the pews that, like African-Americans, women and other past victims of discrimination, LGBT persons are being ridiculed and ostracized “simply because of the way God created them.”

[His daughter Sarah] was the inspiration for [UMC Rev. Michael Tupper's] activism – and the first lesbian bride he married.

[Sarah] and her wife met at the preeminent evangelical university Wheaton College — despite the fact that Tupper, suspecting that his teenage daughter was lesbian, told her that if she were lesbian she should not go to Wheaton.

Tupper reached a sort of out-of-court settlement in the United Methodist Church’s judicial system. He knew when he agreed to officiate [the same-sex wedding] that he might be defrocked for it . . . But Tupper was cleared to continue ministry at his church near Kalamazoo, Mich.

Then he performed his second gay wedding, that of a fellow United Methodist minister who was banned from his pulpit when he came out as gay. Tupper expected, after he helped officiate Benjamin Hutchison’s wedding, that he would face a church trial.

Nobody was prepared for Pastor Cynthia Meyer's coming out declaration during the Edgerton United Methodist Church's first sermon this 2016, but the 53-year-old Kansas pastor decided then that it was the best time for her to serve "with full authenticity and as my genuine self—as a woman who loves and shares my life with another woman."

Meyer risks being sacked because of her pronouncement, but she insists that her conscience is clear because she keeps "faith with the church by challenging it to keep faith with the Gospel."

Conservative Methodists, on the other hand, are not condoning Meyer's vocal support of same-sex relationships and marriages.

They wrote: "We simply cannot abandon the Bible's teachings on the practice of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Your proposal would put us, who believe that same-sex relations are sinful, in the position of having to deny our consciences. This new policy is simply asking us to do something we cannot do."

The New York Annual Conference's Board of Ordained Ministry released a statement Tuesday noting that they will no longer consider the sexual orientation or gender identity of an ordination candidate.

The Rev. William B. Pfohl, chair of the NYAC BOOM and chief signatory of the statement, told The Christian Post that the . . . final vote on the released statement took place on Feb. 20, with a supermajority of the New York board approving the standards via secret ballot.

NYAC is not the only conference in the UMC that has recently announced its decision to ignore the denomination's ordination rules regarding homosexual practice.

Last month the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Baltimore-Washington Conference announced that they recommended a married lesbian to a provisional deacon position.